They say in the old tales that the first night after a child is
born, the Bidhata Purush comes down to earth himself to decide what its
fortune is to be. That is why they bathe babies in sandalwood water and
wrap them in soft red malmal, color of luck. That is why they leave
sweetmeats by the cradle. Silver-leafed sandesh, dark pantuas floating
in golden syrup, jilipis orange as the heart of a fire, glazed with
honey-sugar. If the child is especially lucky, in the morning it will
all be gone.

“That’s because the servants sneak in during the night and eat
them,” says Anju, giving her head an impatient shake as Abha Pishi oils
her hair. This is how she is, my cousin, always scoffing, refusing to
believe. But she knows, as I do, that no servant in all of Calcutta
would dare eat sweets meant for a god.

The old tales say this also: In the wake of the Bidhata Purush come
the demons, for that is the world’s nature, good and evil mingled. That
is why they leave an oil lamp burning. That is why they place the sacred
tulsi leaf under the baby’s pillow for protection. In richer
households, like the one my mother grew up in, she has told us, they
hire a brahmin to sit in the corridor and recite auspicious prayers all
night.

“What nonsense,” Anju says. “There are no demons.”

I am not so sure. Perhaps they do not have the huge teeth, the curved blood-dripping claws and bulging red eyes of our Children’s Ramayan Picture Book,
but I have a feeling they exist. Haven’t I sensed their breath, like
slime-black fingers brushing my spine? Later, when we are alone, I will
tell Anju this.

But in front of others I am always loyal to her. So I say, bravely, “That’s right. Those are just old stories.”

It is early evening on our terrace, its bricks overgrown with moss. A
time when the sun hangs low on the horizon, half hidden by the pipal
trees which line our compound walls all the way down the long driveway
to the bolted wrought-iron gates. Our great-grandfather had them planted
one hundred years ago to keep the women of his house safe from the gaze
of strangers. Abha Pishi, one of our three mothers, has told us this.

Yes, we have three mothers—perhaps to make up for the fact that we have no fathers.

There’s Pishi, our widow aunt who threw herself heart-first into her
younger brother’s household when she lost her husband at the age of
eighteen. Dressed in austere white, her graying hair cut close to her
scalp in the orthodox style so that the bristly ends tickle my palms
when I run my hands over them, she’s the one who makes sure we are
suitably dressed for school in the one-inch-below-the-knee uniforms the
nuns insist on. She finds for us, miraculously, stray pens and inkpots
and missing pages of homework. She makes us our favorite dishes: luchis
rolled out and fried a puffy golden-brown, potato and cauliflower curry
cooked without chilies, thick sweet payesh made from the milk of
Budhi-cow, whose owner brings her to our house each morning to be milked
under Pishi’s stern, miss-nothing stare. On holidays she plaits jasmine
into our hair. But most of all Pishi is our fount of information, the
one who tells us the stories our mothers will not, the secret,
delicious, forbidden tales of our past.

There’s Anju’s mother, whom I call Gouri Ma, her fine cheekbones and
regal forehead hinting at generations of breeding, for she comes from a
family as old and respected as that of the Chatterjees, which she
married into. Her face is not beautiful in the traditional sense—even I,
young as I am, know this. Lines of hardship are etched around her mouth
and on her forehead, for she was the one who shouldered the burden of
keeping the family safe on that thunderclap day eight years ago when she
received news of our fathers’ deaths. But her eyes, dark and
endless-deep—they make me think of Kalodighi, the enormous lake behind
the country mansion our family used to own before Anju and I were born.
When Gouri Ma smiles at me with her eyes, I stand up straighter. I want
to be noble and brave, just like her.

Lastly (I use this word with some guilt), there’s my own mother,
Nalini. Her skin is still golden, for though she’s a widow my mother is
careful to apply turmeric paste to her face each day. Her perfect-shaped
lips glisten red from paan, which she loves to chew—mostly for the
color it leaves on her mouth, I think. She laughs often, my mother,
especially when her friends come for tea and talk. It is a glittery,
tinkling sound, like jeweled ankle bells, people say, though I myself
feel it is more like a thin glass struck with a spoon. Her cheek feels
as soft as the lotus flower she’s named after on those rare occasions
when she presses her face to mine. But more often when she looks at me a
frown ridges her forehead between eyebrows beautiful as wings. Is it
from worry or displeasure? I can never tell. Then she remembers that
frowns cause age lines and smoothes it away with a finger.

Now Pishi stops oiling Anju’s hair to give us a wicked smile. Her
voice grows low and shivery, the way it does when she’s telling ghost
stories. “They’re listening, you know. The demons. And they don’t like
little eight-year-old girls talking like this. Just wait till tonight . .
.”

Because I am scared I interrupt her with the first thought that
comes into my head. “Pishi Ma, tell no, did the sweets disappear for
us?”

Sorrow moves like smoke-shadow over Pishi’s face. I can see that she
would like to make up another of those outrageous tales that we so love
her to tell, full of magic glimmer and hoping. But finally she says,
her voice flat, “No, Sudha. You weren’t so lucky.”

I know this already. Anju and I have heard the whispers. Still, I must ask one more time.

“Did you see anything that night?” I ask. Because she was
the one who stayed with us the night of our birth while our mothers lay
in bed, still in shock from the terrible telegram which had sent them
both into early labor that morning. Our mothers, lying in beds they
would never again share with their husbands. My mother weeping, her
beautiful hair tangling about her swollen face, punching at a pillow
until it burst, spilling cotton stuffing white as grief. Gouri Ma, still
and silent, staring up into a darkness which pressed upon her like the
responsibilities she knew no one else in the family could take on.

To push them from my mind I ask urgently, “Did you at least hear something?”

Pishi shakes her head in regret. “Maybe the Bidhata Purush doesn’t
come for girl-babies.” In her kindness she leaves the rest unspoken, but
I’ve heard the whispers often enough to complete it in my head. For girl-babies who are so much bad luck that they cause their fathers to die even before they are born.

Anju scowls, and I know that as always she can see into my thoughts
with the X-ray vision of her fiercely loving eyes. “Maybe there’s no
Bidhata Purush either,” she states and yanks her hair from Pishi’s hands
though it is only half-braided. She ignores Pishi’s scolding shouts and
stalks to her room, where she will slam the door.

But I sit very still while Pishi’s fingers rub the hibiscus oil into
my scalp, while she combs away knots with the long, soothing rhythm I
have known since the beginning of memory. The sun is a deep, sad red,
and I can smell, faint on the evening air, wood smoke. The pavement
dwellers are lighting their cooking fires. I’ve seen them many times
when Singhji, our chauffeur, drives us to school: the mother in a worn
green sari bent over a spice-grinding stone, the daughter watching the
baby, keeping him from falling into the gutter. The father is never
there. Maybe he is running up a platform in Howrah station in his red
turban, his shoulders knotted from carrying years of trunks and bedding
rolls, crying out, “Coolie chahiye, want a coolie, memsaab?” Or maybe,
like my father, he too is dead.

Whenever I thought this my eyes would sting with sympathy, and if by
chance Ramur Ma, the vinegary old servant woman who chaperones us
everywhere, was not in the car, I’d beg Singhji to stop so I could hand
the girl a sweet out of my lunch box. And he always did.

Among all our servants—but no, I do not really think of him as a
servant—I like Singhji the best. Perhaps it is because I can trust him
not to give me away to the mothers the way Ramur Ma does. Perhaps it is
because he is a man of silences, speaking only when necessary—a quality I
appreciate in a house filled with female gossip. Or perhaps it is the
veil of mystery which hangs over him.

When Anju and I were about five years old, Singhji appeared at our
gate one morning—like a godsend, Pishi says—looking for a driver’s job.
Our old chauffeur had recently retired, and the mothers needed a new one
badly but could not afford it. Since the death of the fathers, money
had been short. In his broken Bengali, Singhji told Gouri Ma he’d work
for whatever she could give him. The mothers were a little suspicious,
but they guessed that he was so willing because of his unfortunate
looks. It is true that his face is horrifying at first glance—I am
embarrassed to remember that as a little girl I had screamed and run
away when I saw him. He must have been caught in a terrible fire years
ago, for the skin of the entire upper half of his face—all the way up to
his turban—is the naked, puckered pink of an old burn. The fire had
also scorched away his eyebrows and pulled his eyelids into a slant,
giving him a strangely oriental expression at odds with the thick black
mustache and beard that covers the rest of his face.

“He’s lucky we hired him at all,” Mother’s fond of saying. “Most
people wouldn’t have because that burned forehead is a sure sign of
lifelong misfortune. Besides, he’s so ugly.”

I do not agree. Sometimes when he does not know that I am watching
him, I have caught a remembering look, at once faraway and intent, in
Singhji’s eyes—the kind of look an exiled king might have as he thinks
about the land he left behind. At those times his face is not ugly at
all, but more like a mountain peak that has withstood a great ice storm.
And somehow I feel we are the lucky ones because he chose to come to
us.

Once I heard the servants gossiping about how Singhji had been a
farmer somewhere in Punjab until the death of his family from a cholera
epidemic made him take to the road. It made me so sad that although
Mother had strictly instructed me never to talk about personal matters
with any of the servants, I ran out to the car and told him how sorry I
was about his loss. He nodded silently. No other response came from the
burned wall of his face. But a few days later he told me that he used to
have a child.

Though Singhji offered no details about this child, I immediately
imagined that it had been a little girl my age. I could not stop
thinking of her. How did she look? Did she like the same foods we did?
What kinds of toys had Singhji bought for her from the village bazaar?
For weeks I would wake up crying in the middle of the night because I
had dreamed of a girl thrashing about on a mat, delirious with pain. In
the dream she had my face.

“Really, Sudha!” Anju would tell me, in concern and exasperation—I
often slept in her room and thus the job of comforting me fell to
her—“How come you always get so worked up about imaginary things?”

That is what she would be saying if she were with me right now. For
it seems to me I am receding, away from Pishi’s capable hands, away from
the solidity of the sun-warmed bricks under my legs, that I am falling
into the first night of my existence, where Anju and I lie together in a
makeshift cradle in a household not ready for us, sucking on sugared
nipples someone has put in our mouths to keep us quiet. Anjali and
Basudha, although in all the turmoil around us no one has thought to
name us yet. Anjali, which means offering, for a good woman is to offer
up her life for others. And Basudha, so that I will be as patient as the
earth goddess I am named after. Below us, Pishi is a dark,
stretched-out shape on the floor, fallen into exhausted sleep, the dried
salt of tears crusting her cheeks.

The Bidhata Purush is tall and has a long, spun-silk beard like the
astrologer my mother visits each month to find out what the planets have
in store for her. He is dressed in a robe made of the finest white
cotton, his fingers drip light, and his feet do not touch the ground as
he glides toward us. When he bends over our cradle, his face is so
blinding-bright I cannot tell his expression. With the first finger of
his right hand he marks our foreheads. It is a tingly feeling, as when
Pishi rubs tiger-balm on our temples. I think I know what he writes for
Anju. You will be brave and clever, you will fight injustice, you
will not give in. You will marry a fine man and travel the world and
have many sons. You will be happy.

It is more difficult to imagine what he writes for me. Perhaps he writes beauty,
for though I myself do not think so, people say I am beautiful—even
more than my mother was in the first years of her marriage. Perhaps he
writes goodness, for though I am not as obedient as my mother
would like, I try hard to be good. There is a third word he writes, the
harsh angles of which sting like fire, making me wail, making Pishi sit
up, rubbing her eyes. But the Bidhata Purush is gone already, and all
she sees is a swirl—cloud or sifted dust—outside the window, a fading
glimmer, like fireflies.